Krysia Jopek

Rain and ice fall on the House incessantly—for an eternity today.

The inhabitants dream of chartreuse leaves unfurling from the tree-skeleton limbs at the windows, emeralds far beneath the snow, love again.

Dust settles on material things they no longer need: the untuned piano with yellow-teeth keys, a pile of warped vinyl records, the paperback books with print too small to read.

The dog, who barks only in his sleep, sleeping; chasing acrobatic squirrels or scared bunnies, stuck still in the post-winter grass.

Garden beds await sun and hands in the dream that wraps around yesterday’s confusion, sleep’s down-feather blankets sheathing.

The ghosts of the house receding for respite from the unsettling conversations about entropy.

They accompany the owl in the backyard towering pines that sway in March winds.

Sentences might be constructed to lure them back across the empty brick patio.

We’re better now, we tell them.

The old woman will walk.

Snowdrops, primrose, crocuses, and daffodils preen under orange and yellow bird feeders.

Meet me at the corner of trauma and belief, crocus and daffodil, underneath where I buried the dolls, their cracked faces, eyes open since winter.

Lily of the valley cupped bells and bleeding-heart lace shall decorate our sadness with iris and hyacinth-girl blossom beyond the bent poplars.

Our lost fathers have gone fishing for trout and shad, watching over our chipped, marble shoulders from absconded lily pads.

By the shed, I’ve left the talismans with my dread of the disease in the rusted suitcase of lost incantations.

Saturday’s late light falls through six feet of reverberations between us—awkward arias of abandon, etching away, while the neighbor’s children trampoline out of our skin.

Unsettling notes, crumpled pages, alight new tulips, earthworms carried by restless robins hopping away with our vaguest dreams of June.

Then we’ll picnic with the best version of ourselves; barter violets and emerald grass until the sickness falls away–hours cascading where inertia doesn’t hurt.

Meet me by the backyard garden under the sweet pea trellises, the ascending Equinox moon.

Tell the dream winding through prolifetating corrodors of broken windows not to end too soon.

Daffodil cups, intense yellow, trading sun.

The house, a main character, gives away its chimney, porch light, stairs.

The ceilings are filled with mourning doves, twitching pigeons.

At night the cello becomes human.

I had missed him, but the space he left grew wings.

Love is a music that bursts.

We are sorry for the delay of sentences meandering absurd fictions.

When you return, do so full-heartedly, so the falling city can gather wind.

Wing after wing tracing sky through fallout, brambles, and made-up magic.

Tell us something about the glass chariot sure to shatter sky when day crashes night.

How odd the poem keeps going without the conductor.

The trains have derailed in the boy’s basement room.

Out of nowhere, an army and makeshift barricade.

The bombing isn’t as loud on TV.

Dreams still appear truculent.

Don’t stare at the sun holding your worn-out suitcase of beliefs.

Things will go easier this way.

The brain is a city turned in on itself.

Parts of the grid have disappeared.

The neighbors can’t speak to one another about where they’ve been.

Children recognize their parents’ sorrows.

The mayor sleeps farthest from the sun.

Wind storms stole my vocation from me, my warrior name, my belief in a certain type of love.

I’m designing a patch under the sleeve to come back.

An elixir for figuring some of this out.

If I remember where you are, I’m sheathed in Sunday dream.

When the coffee wears off–the final winter days, truculent, shuffle sunlight.

The newly-fallen snow lights up the night.

We are beholden in the field of the poem.

When the planes lean down into their lights to land, we still ourselves in sink holes from long-ago buried tree trunks.

No one really remembers.

How the plow truck almost found us walking at the edge of the front yard.

How one sable, velvet glove waved to the confused old man from the frozen stream.

Or that there are plastic coffins amassed at the left corner of night in case the plane loses its passengers en route home.

But it’s very late now.

The stars are hidden behind a gauze of cloud-blanket not fog.

One street lamp blinks in and out, a misplaced lighthouse overlooking ice-encrusted tar.

A lazy eye wandering the neighborhood looking for coyotes.

When the missing glove is realized, one is already preoccupied with paying for this month’s electricity, this winter’s heating oil—while lining the pills up on the counter for tomorrow.

Everything hurt all at once, but the dream would come and rescue the old woman from her body.

The dream would set the table for a conversation with our ghosts.

Sleep comes and wants to take us.

Where? I ask, but sleep doesn’t answer.

Dreams pouring the boiled kettle over frozen birdbaths.

Winter drinking darkness and fire, domino-ing subtractions.

The holiday misplaced its presents, your blue notebook of revisions, my new gray sweater.

The cold causing some to sing before the deer found us.

When the house gave up its shadows, we followed sun.

Cathedral rooms of snow, pages of blackbirds, sentences that don’t end, my sea-logged, sea-bird feather pen.

The apparitions on the first floor steal wax paper envelopes of stamps.

The golden Madonna staring directly into the camera lens.

Last night the protagonist of the story misplaced the magical horizon, followed the river’s ice-flow.

Given the chest X-rays, everyone dreamed the sickness away.

On last year’s footage, the mob’s delusions play out tragically until the end of a different book.

Rrecycle, re-use, re-group, re-focus.

Sea lily.

The hurt animal under the holly.

Victorian porch labyrinth.

Wrought iron bird cages and window boxes.

Don’t shovel the deck.

Tell them you’re preparing for someone else’s future.

Twilight loses its wing.

The dog sleeps in.

The stitching of the series reveals our nomad names.

It’s not too late to play the shortest day against the new hour of ice-moon. Hello.

The new book climbed the house with prognostications we could’t claim.

The dream neurologists said I forgot I had forgotten you.

The spinal cord refusing.

Others would be looking, not for us, but for themselves

I can’t feel anymore, she said.

We’re frozen to the empty skating pond.

He said, the muse tangled your hair through tree branches gone thin.

Away from sun.

Take heart, he said–

It’s all temporary.

The House is quiet.

It can’t get any darker than 4:15 in December.

He said my eyes glowed green in the afternoon light before the sun gently fell.

The garage was cleaned enough to house the car.

There was enough wood left over from last year for at least one fire.

The surgery would end spinal pain eventually, if successful.

2 weeks of 37 staples down the back, a painful zipper.

Some would visit.

The dog and cat draw near.

Hospitals are sad places.

Nervous birds blend in with the curled oak’s tired hands before supper.

One foot of winter stepping in seems cruel already.

Maybe snow for Christmas.

How are you?

There’s an envelope with a song for you I left in your mailbox.

A nuthatch in autumn leaves wrapped in white velvet that won’t last the night.

At the LOST & FOUND, I can’t wake up.

The wooden ruler with the metal edge sticking out has wreaked havoc while I was measuring the distance to stars.

I wish I could tell you [but I’m too tired of typing and blue-lit screens, election results and surgeries] —

how I long to be the poem you need.

The brain wanted to be skin that healed quickly.

Skin wanted to feel abstractions like hierarchy or revenge.

Stars wished upon falling humans.

Someone waited at the bottom of the stairs to catch the subject of the study.

There was talk of hostages during awkward dinners without salt.

The sea existed on calendars that never traveled.

We knew so much then, it hurt to sing.

Long paragraphs had cadences that went missing.

Flesh clings to its skeleton because the years chisel.

The old woman fell, and the stars couldn’t return her.

Small robots have taught themselves to play soccer.

They don’t manifest any addiction, anxiety, or despair.

When they vote for a leader, some will learn to paint.

Others will write poetry about unknowable gods.

The mouse in the wall found the hatchway that wouldn’t close completely.

The house is on high alert because of other tragedies.

War etched itself indelibly.

I don’t recognize myself in the wind.

There’s nothing suitable for binge watching.

It could be just another yesterday.

Someone said on Thursday.

Seven bluebirds line up before winter in a dream play.

A hundred blackbirds leave summer lawns with swoops and reordering.

The package never arrives with any conviction.

It’s preferable to stay awake and let sadness sleep.

Sadness dreams of the missing subject that slid past singing.

Skin uses all its energy to heal.